Want To Be A Video Star? Learn To EditWant To Be A Video Star? Learn To Edit

The skill (or, at least, the creativity) reflected by many of the videos appearing on video services like YouTube and Yahoo Video astounds me. Although it really shouldn't; this world is full of talented people, and given an outlet, they will find a way to use it. Throw a random phrase into a search field -- say, "NYC" -- and you'll come up with a report on building bike lanes or a music video of drummer David Van Tieghem tapping rhythms along the streets of Manhattan. Good stuff.If you want to be an online video star, one thing that can help you hone your craft (besides a few minutes to consider whether anybody is really interested in your pet frog) is decent editing software. If you want to cut out the less successful parts, splice together scenes from different videos, throw some credits into the beginning -- in other words, make something that looks at least somewhat professional -- you'll need the right tools.

In Four Feature-Filled Video Editors For $100 And Less, Serdar Yegulalp reports on Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0, CyberLink PowerDirector 5 Premium, Pinnacle Studio Plus 10.7, and Ulead VideoStudio 10 Plus -- all of which include a number of professional-level features (such as multichannel audio and support of the MPEG video standard). If you're used to free applications such as OpenOffice or Google Docs & Spreadsheets, the $100 that each of these packages costs may sound like a lot -- but compared to the several-hundred-dollar price tag on most sophisticated video editing software, it's a bargain.

But you'd better be careful what you put online. Microsoft has accused Google of using its Book Search project to violate copyright -- it's only a matter of time before Redmond starts looking at video clips as well. Meanwhile, Viacom is demanding that Google remove more than 100,000 clips from YouTube. The fight over what gets posted, and by whom, is just beginning -- so, just in case, you might want to make sure that everything that you post is completely your own.